Well, well, well...

Have you ever tried to do something new and found that it was harder than you thought? And along the way, has someone shaken your confidence--making it even harder to accomplish your goals? Well that's happened to me. But I'm not giving up, no way. I'm going to keep trying until I get it right (Kaleidostar reference, by the way).

So anyway, I've been working on Nu Casual lately. I started on a 3.0 version back in 2000, but I got distracted and never finished. The funny thing is that Nu Casual was a design prototype for Essence. I took the three bitmap sizes of Apple's Casual font from the Newton OS and made an outline font for each one. I then merged them together to make one outline font that had all the characteristics of the three bitmap designs.

I was very happy with the results from the original Nu Casual, however, I've always thought it could be a bit better. So that's what I'm doing. But instead of just working on the one font that is Nu Casual, I'm going back to the original three outline designs. I figure that I can come up with better ways of approximating the original bitmap design by working directly on that.

I use the template layer to store the original bitmap of the size I'm working on. So I need to be able to see the original bitmap and the vector shape at the same time. The problem that I've been having (at least up until today), is that FontLab altered Fontographer's template layer display. Fontographer displayed the template image as pure black, instead of the grey that the older version of Fontographer. This makes working on the vector shape difficult because you can't see what you are doing.

Thankfully, version 4.7.2 fixed this problem!